Origin Stories

I went to see Thor: The Dark World the weekend it came out because I need reasons to leave the house when there's work looming. The original Thor (in the current reboot) was kind of boring because they spent SO much time on the origin story that you didn't get much meat. (FYI: I loved the Dark World for it's delicious meaty center... aka Loki.)

Plus, I was annoyed by the Jane-and-Thor-love-at-4-hours-of-knowing-each-other, MFEO bullshit. At 36.5 (I'm counting half years again), and still very very single, I find this obnoxious and lacking in realism. I'll believe in semi-gods of Thunder coming from the sky with giant hammers, but love at first site? Ridic and insulting to my intelligence.

Can you imagine them at a dinner party? "So how'd you guys meet?" "Well, my father took my hammer, banished me to earth, and while there I met this tiny little scientist with whom I fell madly in love.  And while I vowed to return I got distracted by alien invasions and whatnot. When I did come back like 2 years later she was still single and I took her to meet my parents who weren't impressed. Also, it's pretty much her fault that a bunch of people died. No big." 

I do love a real life origin story though. How people got from A to B and especially how they met their special people. Pre-internet, the world felt like a giant place. Post-internet the world became smaller, but actually meeting people and knowing them feels harder because we're always just staring at our devices talking to people not near us.

We all know how I know WC... it's in this name, so that story isn't all that interesting. My closest friends in High School were either in my Latin class or I'd known since grade school. My friends from college were cultivated based on proximity (neighbors in the dorms) and then our common disdain for the rest of the student body (self-imposed outcasts have a radar for their own kind).

What I like are the stories of happenstance. One small change to the wind and everything could have been different. I love when people meet in Paris but both live in Chicago. I love when people have had the same friends of friends for a decade and have never met until they do and then they live happily ever after.

I met my friend Katie on the internet before people were really doing that. We'd been on the same message board for a long time (with hundreds of other active members). She moved from Virginia to an apartment less than a mile from my office. So we started with lunch and then we quickly moved to happy hour and then I was suddenly sleeping  over all the time due to excessive alcohol consumption (on the couch... we're not tramps... sheesh). This is my exception to the love-at-first-sight annoyance... Love at first inability-to-shut-up... And if I'd had the slightest concern about meeting strangers from the internet as I probably should have, I wouldn't have shown up at Noodles and Company that first day.

Trish isn't so much an awkward meeting as an unlikely ongoing friendship. We were both dating guys who were friends when we met. We hung out as the girlfriends of these dudes, but we weren't actually friends until our breakups. I called her a few weeks after her breakup (mine was a few months prior). We had dinner and bonded over the cult-like behavior of the circle of guys we'd dated into and the terrible demise of our respective relationships. What exactly drove me to reach out could have just as easily not happened.

I always envy people who make friends easily. I've been going to the same gym for 2.5 years and about 2 months ago a girl who'd been in my sandbells class regularly said we should get together sometime and I haven't seen her since.

I'm actually a very friendly person, but my social skills amount to diving into a conversation without introducing myself like everyone already knows me and telling a story normal people would only tell their closest friends and then walking away satisfied that I talked to strangers. If people actually like me, this behavior requires them to seek me out ("Who was that lady?"), follow up, assure me I'm not imposing on their lives, and repeatedly invite me to things until I feel like they truly want me around and don't just feel sorry for me.

But once you have me, you're stuck with me forever. Congrats.